Decisões judiciais: instrumento de acesso à justiça? Proposta de um vocabulário para simplificação de termos

Abstract

Guaranteeing access to justice in pursuit of the defense of rights is among the fundamental principles of the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988; However, it is common to observe that the vocabulary used in the Law area offers some restriction to the understanding of judicial decisions. This work is the result of this reflection on the obstacles that exist for the full understanding of legal acts, such as judicial decisions, by citizens considered laymen from the area specialized point of view. The general objective of this research is to identify some legal terms, from examples in usage, in legal documents, which may hinder or compromise the full understanding of judicial decisions and to propose the development of a monolingual legal vocabulary model for the purpose of terminological simplification, with the use of VoTec (Online Technical Vocabulary), developed by Fromm (2007) in his doctoral thesis, as a tool to contribute to enhance access to justice. The main theoretical references that supported this research are studies related to Terminology (Krieger; Finatto, 2004), the Communicative Theory of Terminology (Cabré, 1998), Terminography (Bevilacqua; Finatto, 2006) and Corpus Linguistics (Berber Sardinha, 2004) and to carry out the analysis of linguistic data we chose to use the WordSmith Tools software (Scott, 2016). Using the analysis of the linguistic description of Corpus Linguistics, we compiled a corpus, with the requests and decisions made in a single judicial process, that is, the “deretirement” action filed in the Federal Court of Rio do Sul, Judiciary Section of Santa Catarina, under no. 5000891-27.2010.4.04.7213. However, during the research, we observed that this single corpus was not able to offer sufficient definitional and/or explanatory contexts to clarify the various terms found in its extension. Therefore, we chose to compile two other corpora consisting of books on Civil Procedural Law and on Social Security Law. From the original corpus, we selected candidate terms with the potential to help us in the construction of entries, located the defining and/or explanatory contexts of each one and selected five of them, registering their distinctive features with VoTec. With this, it became possible to develop a simplified final definition of these terms based on corpora, with the aim of fitting this definition into the legal text, through an appositive for the term in question. In a Note (with a more encyclopedic character), we included features of the concept that were not covered in the definition, with the aim of making available, for consultation in VoTec, a broader definition with more clarifications for each legal term. To analyze the applicability of this proposal, we selected some excerpts from the corpus in which the terms registered for a textual simplification exercise through appositive were found, in which we included the simplified definitions immediately after the terms, which allowed us to verify that the presence of a definition, even if simplified, can be considered another resource to contribute to the understanding of legal texts, especially for a reader who is not a professional and, therefore, does not have extensive knowledge of the Terminology of the area, becoming an instrument of access to justice. Therefore, we believe that the proposal for a monolingual legal vocabulary model for terminological simplification purposes presented here has the potential to contribute positively as one of the possibilities for guaranteeing access to justice, considering its interest in offering more conditions for understanding, especially judicial decisions, from lay readers, who equally deserve to understand about the Law and its applicability in common life.